[E6] The Role of Strategic Alliances with Yeva Roberts of PFL.com

Yeva Roberts of PFL.com joins the AppChat Podcast to share what her role as Senior Director of Strategic Alliances & Innovation entails and how relationship building plays an integral role.

Also addressed is the critical gatekeeper role of Salesforce solution engineers, successful tactics PFL uses to interact with them to drive sales, and what to look for in a great Alliances Manager of your own.

Here are the key topics, with timestamps, as well as the full interview transcript:

Brian Walsh: 00:13 Welcome back everybody. We are back on the AppChat podcast and today I’m joined by someone I think is absolutely fascinating. I had the honor of working with her for the past, I think a year and a half, two years. We’ve been on and off again, been working on things, having conversations, meeting up at conferences — and so with us is Yeva Roberts who’s the Alliances Manager for PrintingForLess.com. Welcome.

Yeva Roberts: 00:39 Thanks, Brian. I’m so excited to be here.

Brian Walsh: 00:41 It is great to be here. I’m sorry everybody else doesn’t get to see the video of this because your smile just makes me want to speak in a really happy tone. So thank you for that. How would you define your role as an Alliance Manager? What does that mean?

Yeva Roberts: 00:56 Wow. So, that’s a tough one. So I guess it depends on what stage of growth you’re in. As an ISV, I think for us being a startup within a larger company, it means that you get to wear multiple hats. So initially if you’re the very first Strategic Alliances, evangelists is what we call each other, you get to be the channel operations person, the channel sales, channel marketing, what have you, because you’re really trying to prove your worth in an AppExchange exchange of 4,000 apps. So for you and me, I think it’s a matter of just being open to wearing multiple hats and navigating the ecosystem, and being that internal subject matter expert on Salesforce. As well as being that external subject matter expert on PFL, in my case to all the Salesforce solution engineers, account executives, marketing teams, PR, as well as all the SIs and ISV partners.

Brian Walsh: 01:55 That is such an interesting role. I once heard it described to me as you’re in charge of making sure two large companies, corporations, actually can speak the same language and understand each other.

Yeva Roberts: 02:06 Yeah, it’s funny. I love that because you’re essentially a translator. You’re getting to look at the world through a keyhole, really two keyholes, right? So you get to see your worldview as an ISV and then you get to advocate for and evangelize the second worldview of your partnership.

Brian Walsh: 02:24 So why don’t we back up a second and actually talk about Printing For Less. What is PFL? What do you do?

Yeva Roberts: 02:33 So PFL is actually about 20-year-old company and it got its start as America’s first eCommerce only print shop. So imagine in 1996 and 1998, that time period where eCommerce was still in its infancy, PFL had this idea really. The founder, Andrew, and his partner had an idea of, “Hey, we’re in Montana, you know what would be really cool is to open up a print store.” But because as you can imagine, the population in Montana doesn’t really require you to have a storefront, they decided why don’t we copy what Amazon user experience is like. At the time Amazon was just launching it and so they went live with the storefront on website only, so there was no physical store. And then fast forward, they accumulated about 125,000 small business customers. Those small business customers grew up and they thought that while Printing For Less — or PFL now — was doing a great job with print, what they were starting to do is really adopt tools like Salesforce for their CRM or marketing automation platforms and digital marketing platforms. And then they said, “Hey, you do a great job for us in print and since you are a marketing technology company first, meaning you have the API and the tech stack, why don’t you integrate and make our lives so much easier. Integrate with these CRMs and these marketing automation platforms. And so that’s when PFL, Andrew, and the team decided to pivot. It’s been really about five years ago now that they decided to pivot and really take the company into a new direction. And we still have our 125,000 small business customers to serve on the direct side of the business. But now we’re working within Salesforce and other ecosystems as well.

Brian Walsh: 04:24 All right. So their printing shop, they’ve built up 125,000 customers, start pivoting into actually a channel model working with different marketing automation, different CRM and sales process on there. How did you get involved?

Yeva Roberts: 04:41 I love that story. It’s one of my favorites, so I’m actually a digital marketer by training. So I spent about 10 years in the B2C space, and I was managing digital strategy for some global brands as well as direct mail. So I was really in the thick of things, trying to figure out how to integrate email and direct mail and social together to go to market in the integrated way, and at the time — I guess this was probably eight years ago — marketing automation was still in its infancy. Salesforce was still trying to figure out how do we really support B2C brands. So I was struggling being in the middle doing everything manually, in terms of handing over files and walking them over for direct mail, to the digital team, or the taking the files for digital and handing them off to the direct marketing agency. And so I thought, “Hey, you know, after so many years of being in the middle, it would be kind of fun to pivot as well and go into a more product development, product marketing role, and figure out a way how to integrate a printing type environment with an email service. And so ExactTarget — I was a user at the time — was in our backyard, and so I went work for a printing company here locally in Ohio and just convinced the executive to give me some play money. And, so we decided to do the very first light integration into ExactTargets’ Hub Exchange. So at the time they didn’t have Journey Builder, they still had Automation Studio at the time. And so we did this light integration, it was really just a test. And so I’m really excited, the engineering team is really excited. Again, working for this other printing company and ExactTarget is super excited and this is 2012 and we go to this user conference. We have our first showcase, we go to the user conference again the following year and I meet PFL. So PFL is that the exhibit hall, the Expo Hall. And I walk up to them like, “You know what, you did a great job swag bombing our entire executive team with your tactile marketing automation concept.” And I absolutely love you for doing that because you know, here I am advocating for this integration because as a marketer I feel like it’s a problem that we need to solve in the marketplace, and I would love to see your app. And so it all happened in their booth. Their CMO and founder, Andrew, showed me what they had built and I absolutely fell in love with it because obviously, it was like, here’s my light version, MVP if you will, and here is their full-on product stack of what I wish I would have built.

Brian Walsh: 07:30 What it could be.

Yeva Roberts: 07:31 Exactly. And I was like, “Is this working?” You know, the usual kind of customer question you get, “Is this for real? Did you actually build this or is this still POC concept,” right? Proof of concept. They’re like, “No, this is working. This is how it looks.” So anyway, fast forward, we stayed in touch and I eventually moved over to the team. I think I was in a product marketing role managing ExactTarget reseller professional service, and I thought, “You know what? I would love to do this 100% and just evangelize what PFL team has built.” And since I understood the marketplace, had been in the Salesforce ecosystem for so long, both as a customer and as a partner, that it just made sense and they needed somebody that knew how to navigate it, that had a passion for it and could talk peer to peer. I think that’s so important in the Strategic Alliances role that you truly understand the problem that you’re trying to solve with your apps. And so we didn’t know, I think the two of us didn’t really know what it was going to end up looking like and we’ve been figuring it out ever since.

Brian Walsh: 08:41 That’s wonderful. So it’s like six years ago, they’re already using the term of tactile marketing automation. Now they’re saying, “Hey, here’s the physical representation of what we’ve been doing on digital, around ads and email and all of the other piece. When that happened, when everyone started talking about ABM, there must’ve been fireworks going off at PFL.

Yeva Roberts: 09:04 Oh yeah, absolutely. What you just said is perfect.

Brian Walsh: 09:07 It was like, it was converging because everywhere I go, it’s about the sort of Omnichannel of hitting from all the different angles around your target account list and is there a more impactful way of doing it with them with some printed item that shows up and you provide a way to automate that?

Yeva Roberts: 09:22 Yeah, absolutely. We always talk about like, everything is cyclical, so you had direct mail has been around, print, direct mail, it’s been around for 50 some years if not longer, and then you have this new shiny thing come out, email, and everybody just swarms to using email and direct mail is no longer sexy, and you used to worry about junk mail in your mailbox, now you worry about your junk mail in your inbox, right? And so, as they de-invested and marketers de-invested into direct mail, they’re not coming back around and saying, “Oh my gosh, we have so much digital clutter. How do we break through that? Oh, I know. Why don’t we talk to our friends in the direct marketing space and figure out a way how to integrate that as part of an overall customer journey.” And I think that’s what’s happening. And it’s nothing new, I think we’ve just gotten a lot smarter and now we have tools, like marketing automation tools, to make that happen for us that us marketers 10 years ago didn’t have.

Brian Walsh: 10:18 So I agree with you, it’s not new. But, having worked with Salesforce for so long in digital space, the idea of combining what we’re doing in the digital world and all of the language that we use, our lexicon around that, and then this idea of there’s a print shop and people behind it pushing items, and they’re getting printed and then shipped and mailed. We’ll go back to this translation idea, how do you bridge those two worlds together to make sure everybody understands the value, importance, and opportunity?”

Yeva Roberts: 10:47 So that’s hard, right? On one hand, it’s much easier to introduce a new concept to somebody in maybe the B2B space and high tech who has not traditionally used direct mail, they’re digital natives. And it’s much harder to pivot somebody who is a traditional brand, been using direct mail for a long time, going through this digital transformation and trying to get them to break their old habits of how to think about it in a completely different way. Meaning that their digital email subscriber data is stored in one place, their tools for email execution are also in a different place, and their direct mail, physical mailing address, also live in a completely different place. And for traditional brands, it’s much harder sell because you’re having to re-educate them on breaking this habit. Whereas ABM and the high tech B2B space, it’s so much easier. They get it because they believe in the concept and it’s a new channel for them to add and the integration is so much easier for that.

Brian Walsh: 11:56 So how much of your time is spent relationship building across Salesforce and the partners and that side of the ecosystem, and how much is like business development where you’re actually working the deal. Actually creating a new business opportunity, trying to maybe create a new business line at PFL. How would you break down your job between those sort of responsibilities?

Yeva Roberts: 12:18 I would say education is number one. And so, I think of it like three different degrees of separation from revenue. So the first degree is, like you said, helping the sales team, both sales teams, you know PFL sales team and the Salesforce sales team work together on opportunities, and that’s really the deal conversations. Second degree would be activities that I probably spend the most of my time, which is relationship building, whether it’s lunch and learns or customer shadows, where I go on site with the Salesforce team and conduct a training for their customer. And that’s really where a lot of the magic happens and the relationships are built because for an AE at Salesforce or a solution engineer, they’re looking to us as Strategic Alliance evangelists to be that trusted advisor or the subject matter expert in our space and they want to learn from you so that they could look like a rockstar in front of their customer. So long-term relationships I think is the key in this role. I don’t care about the one and done referral as much as I care about educating my peers within Salesforce to speak our language, understand what tactile marketing automation is all about, understand our value and be able to be comfortable and know that they can always reach out to us, no pressure, and provide thought leadership. So I think relationships is number one and that’s more like a second degree of separation from revenue. And then finally the third stage in degrees of separation is really around executive bridging, which is another relationship layer. I do spend quite a bit of time making sure our executive team is aligned with Salesforces’ executive team whenever those opportunities present themselves.

Brian Walsh: 14:11 Got it. And do those tend to be at events or throughout the year?

Yeva Roberts: 14:16 Oh, every single day, every single day. I think the number one differentiator I hear about all the time for perhaps our competition is that the feedback I get is we are so incredibly responsive. So if there’s a call going on tomorrow and the solution engineer and account executive at Salesforce are prepping for the call, they know that they can reach out to me today and I pick up the phone and answer their questions. Being at their beckon call and being 100% responsive is probably the biggest feedback I get all the time that we do. And I think that’s what builds a really strong relationship as well, as well as coming up with new ideas to enable those teams. New demo environments, keeping those demo environments up and running. We have over a 100 marketing cloud solution engineers actually using our demo. I never even know what kind of meetings PFL has being demoed at every single day. But in good faith, I know that those teams are trained and they’re representing us really well and we’re happy with that. And I think, going back to your original question, I think relationships to us is just part of our long-term strategy.

Brian Walsh: 15:33 Alright, solution engineers, this is like one of my favorite topics because they’re the hidden secret to this whole ball of wax, right?

Yeva Roberts: 15:38 I totally agree.

Brian Walsh: 15:40 They make it happen. Alright, so explain what a solution engineer is.

Yeva Roberts: 15:43 So solution engineers, sometimes referred to sales engineers too I think, they quarterback the AEs. So they’re tasked with understanding what the business requirements are. So existing customers or future customers will come to Salesforce and, especially in the enterprise space, they’ll get assigned to a solution engineer who goes under the hood, understands what their business objectives are, and understands what some of those business requirements they’re looking for to transform their business. They have to be an expert in, imagine 4,000 Apps, which is like obviously impossible. So, I think from an unsung hero perspective, I think they quarterback the customer and the sales team pretty well from that perspective.

Brian Walsh: 16:32 So it’s identifying who these SEs are that are working your target market, it’s building a relationship with them, and then it’s providing them with solutions and education.

Yeva Roberts: 16:43 Yep. And I think that the biggest misconception I hear about a lot is, the executive teams will set a goal, “Hey, you need to kind of get the word out about your app to every single social engineer within the Salesforce ecosystem.” Well we know and you made a great point that being niche and being super specific on which verticals you’re playing in, especially when you’re first starting out, is so critical. These solution engineers, imagine they’re being reached out to by what, 2000 ISVs every single day, either through LinkedIn or emails and they’re bombarded. So, obviously, they’re only going to pay attention to those ISVs that are being strategic in the way they approach them. They have a sharp elevator pitch, they understand the value they provide, and then you can provide them the support and solution engineers while we sleep, prioritize those relationships and really understanding those products more than somebody that boils the ocean and spams them, for lack of better word.

Brian Walsh: 17:43 And their goal is to close this deal for licenses. Not just your product, but really to expand the Salesforce side of the relationship. So, if your product is on target to actually help them do that, then awesome; but if it doesn’t actually help in that process, then they’re not going to talk to you again, right?

Yeva Roberts: 17:59 Absolutely. I think it’s knowing who to reach out to. Like which solution engineers are aligned to your market, the market that you support, and then knowing what value you provide at the moment that they need it so that you’re not constantly in their face but enable them in such a way that they know how to reach out to you. And then when they do, be super gracious and treat them like family.

Brian Walsh: 18:23 Now, you know you’re providing solutions for them to demo and in your case, you’ve got physical printed items. How do you bridge that gap so that it’s actually impactful? I can imagine in your sales process they can mail you something, but now you’ve got like this third party that’s demoing, like how do you pull that together to make sure that their demos are impactful?

Yeva Roberts: 18:43 So, I think that it’s part of our secret weapon in which is we drink our own champagne. What I mean by that, when we onboard a new solution engineer to PFL, part of the onboarding process is me actually using Salesforce to send them a welcome kit. So they actually have a welcome kit that they receive, so they go through the experience. Not only do they have access to the demo, but they receive a kit that spells out exactly what our value is and when we can help them and because they have now gone through the process, they’re a better advocate for us on the call with the customer.

Brian Walsh: 19:22 That’s so cool. Like if you’re doing just digital stuff, it’s like what could I send you? I’ll send you an email. In your case, it’s like a printed box with their name on it and all of the materials inside. What’s inside the box.

Yeva Roberts: 19:32 Oh, okay. Hold on.

Brian Walsh: 19:34 For those of you who can’t see — in fact that’s all of you — she’s got the box. She’s pulling it open, it’s just full, It’s chockablock full of customized content.

Yeva Roberts: 19:43 Yep. It will have an invitation, an idea book, a note card with my headshot, basically just spelling out for them everything they need to know and because it’s tangible, obviously it has a higher chance of being remembered than maybe some of our counterparts on the AppExchange. So, that’s definitely part of our little hat trick.

Brian Walsh: 20:05 That’s great. All right, so let’s move back to this first step. How do you identify the SEs that you think are going to help you the most to get established?

Yeva Roberts: 20:16 I think it definitely goes back to being really critical on your target market. So what I mean is just from an internal alignment with your marketing team, your sales team, you as the Strategic Alliances manager really needs to be super clear with all the other teams internally on who’s part of your go-to-market. Is it financial services, is it health and life sciences, is it retail? And so on and so on. If you have one or two key markets that you’re going after, then it’s really an opportunity for you to reach out to your partner account team at Salesforce and work with them and their leadership team to say, “Hey, who are the RVPs, the AVPs that I need to be aligned with?” And then hop on the sales team call for those teams, do a training, and understand what their focus is that year. And then from that conversation, ask them for the introduction to the solution engineers that support that team. And then it’s a rinse and repeat and by the time you’re done, like we’re three years into it, I now know probably 200 to 300 account executive and the solution engineers that know them. It helps to have an elephant memory, which sometimes it’s to my detriment, but I love people so much that I will remember things about them that maybe they said two years ago and they’re like, “How did you know that, that’s creepy.” But, I think it goes back to Strategic Alliance, it’s all about relationships.

Brian Walsh: 21:46 Right. It’s a people job that you’re doing on there. And I think you’ve raised a great point, as part of the ISV program at Salesforce, you start with your partner account team. And so that partner account manager will help actually put together a go to market strategy for you to say how are we actually selling with Salesforce and make the initial introductions and get that ball rolling for you.

Yeva Roberts: 22:06 Yep. Absolutely.

Brian Walsh: 22:08 And I find that unique within as we look at, if you compared infrastructure, if I’m going to go to an Amazon or decided to do this on my own, walking into these ecosystems, that’s one of the things that a great ecosystem is provided for you.

Yeva Roberts: 22:20 Yeah. And there’s a nuance to also working with your PAMs, partner account managers, because imagine they also have like 40 some ISVs that they’re managing. So you have to be super helpful with them as well in terms of getting to your point very quickly.

Brian Walsh: 22:40 All right. So what are some tips of managing that partner account relationship now?

Yeva Roberts: 22:43 Wow, we’re jumping around. So with the partner account managers, I think being organized for those 30-minute cadence calls that you have with them is always helpful. I think that’s my number one tip is, you can rely on your partner account manager to do that for you. But it’s actually easier if you do that because you know you’re fighting for mindshare against all the 20 to 40 ISVs that they’re working with. And on that call, be super clear on what your number one, just pick one thing that’s important to you for the next two weeks before your next opportunity to speak to them and get support from them. I think being super organized and just having a bit of humility and patience, understanding what their situation is also helps. And then just follow up. I think following up with them is always super helpful and then celebrate those wins. So every single time we close a deal and the partner account manager helps us manage our Chatter community, and they’ll send up “cha-ching” emails on our behalf, that helps them also get more visibility into the community of AEs and solution engineers we support. So you want to celebrate those wins together because it makes it super real for them and they appreciate like, “Why are you asking me for all these introductions and I never get to see the results?” But when you celebrate those wins, they get to see it from, “Oh wow. That account team introduction that I just made for Yeva four months ago actually resulted in a deal.” And that’s how they get incentivized, obviously, as we help them retire their quota.

Brian Walsh: 24:25 So leveraging that Chatter group is actually what’s pushing them to help encourage them to keep doing those introductions and bringing them out back top of mind for them.

Yeva Roberts: 24:41 Yeah, our Chatter group has over, gosh, 350 AEs and solution engineers now, and I think growing a community is really important to us because it’s really that resource for them for content. Trying to get teams to adopt other portals if you will. We’ve tried that, doesn’t work. So keeping everything in the Chatter group is definitely worth it to us and something I don’t see a lot of ISVs using.

Brian Walsh: 25:02 Now, when you first built and you’re using it, I mean it wasn’t part of Salesforce yet, it was a standalone ExactTarget company. Or had it been acquired already by Salesforce?

Yeva Roberts: 25:14 So the Chatter?

Brian Walsh: 25:14 No, PFL, was first ExactTarget and then it was acquired by Salesforce later, right?

Yeva Roberts: 25:21 Exactly. So yeah, by the time I joined the team, I think it was already part of the Salesforce family or was going through the acquisition actually.

Brian Walsh: 25:32 Got it. Okay. How important has Chatter then grown because, at that point, the ExactTarget side wasn’t using Chatter at all, like how did that grow? How does Chatter drive sort of your day to day use?

Yeva Roberts: 25:45 Yeah, so that’s funny you’re making me think back. So when we first started we actually had to host two separate Chatter groups, one for org 62, which is where all the core team members were on Salesforce, and then one on NA7, I think it was called. So it was a different platform, but still Chatter. So two different communities and about probably two years into the acquisition they merged the two Chatter groups and so we ended up with one. But yeah, I think they still asked the ExactTarget marketing cloud team to start using Chatter.

Brian Walsh: 26:21 Got it. And now, does your product work across the multiple clouds at Salesforce or is it still just marketing cloud?

Yeva Roberts: 26:27 No, it’s force.com. So we have four different apps. So because of that, it is extensible. I joke around, we just got back from connections and because it was the first time they brought service, commerce, and marketing cloud together, we had a lot of questions about, “Well I see your app working with sales cloud and marketing cloud, but what if we wanted service cloud?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s extensible through the entire-”

Brian Walsh: 26:53 It’s just force.com.

Yeva Roberts: 26:55 Yeah, exactly. So it was just like, “Of course,” but I realize that not many people know that. And not that we even push that, we’re trying to be super focused and not, like I said, boil the ocean, but if somebody asks us to, we could. That’s the beauty of it. Yeah, that’s the beauty of it.

Brian Walsh: 27:15 We do an annual report, the State of the AppExchange Report and it was one of the most surprising to me findings in it is, how many of the ISVs are actually working across three, four, five different clouds and supporting it and actually leveraging that for all their growth.

Yeva Roberts: 27:32 Yeah, I think coming up connections, it was super clear to me that, that’s part of the growth strategy is cross-cloud. So the ISVs that can go cross-cloud, they’re going to be the ones that are going to stand out from the pack. I think I heard that Salesforce wants to go from what, some close to 4,000 apps to 10,000 by 2020 or something. Did I read that in your report? I read it somewhere, and I was like, well, obviously going to your existing AppExchange partner base and encouraging them to create additional apps that can extend cross-cloud, as part of that strategy in terms of how they are going to grow from three and a half to 10,000 in a year and a half. I think that’s part of it.

Brian Walsh: 28:17 It is. There’s actually a team on the ISV team whose only job is to help bring on partners onto all the new products that they’re acquiring and launching. So as CloudCraze comes into the mix and as marketing cloud, and like each of these pieces gets built in, they want to bring that entire ISV ecosystem with them. So big focus on Quip, big focus on CloudCraze, all of these pieces. Data.com is starting to go away, and so they have lightning data service. So there’s all of these opportunities and you have a team just focused on trying to get you onto a multi-cloud strategy.

Yeva Roberts: 28:51 I didn’t know that. I love that.

Brian Walsh: 28:53 All right. So if you were to give people an idea, they’re out, they’re an ISV, and they’re wanting to start building out an alliances team. They need an alliance manager. What do they look for? What’s the type of role? What’s the type of person that they’re looking for to be a great alliance manager? Is it someone who’s worked at Salesforce? Is it someone who’s done that before? Or is there just an innate attribute about them that would make them great at this job?

Yeva Roberts: 29:20 I think it goes just to DNA, because case in point is I had no background in Strategic Alliances. My background is all product marketing or in digital marketing, and so I’m proof that as long as you value relationships and you have a good strong business acumen and, you know, you can be passionate about whatever the problem the ISV is solving, you can succeed in this role for sure.

Brian Walsh: 29:46 And it looks like you’ve been successful because PFL just announced some big news recently, right?

Yeva Roberts: 29:54 Yes! We just got our funding round from Goldman Sachs for $25 million, I think it was announced in April, and now we’re ramping up and hiring, building out an evangelist team. So if you’re interested, definitely look me up. I’d give you some referrals. I’d love to build out a great team.

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